Towards the end of Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke, Shannon, who sleeps with the main character’s husband (Caleb), does an interview about how much of a fake witch the main character (Natalie) is.
In the interview, Shannon says something along the lines of, “Natalie is not well.”
Well, neither is the author of this drivel.
*spoilers*
Yesteryear follows Natalie Heller Mills, a modern-day trad wife who wakes up in the 1800s.
In the present day, Natalie hates everyone in this book, including herself. Also, nobody likes her. Not even her own mother, Eliza.
Fun fact: Eliza cheated on Natalie’s father, ghosted him, and then claimed he was unfaithful and had abandoned his family.
Why?
Because she enjoyed being single.
Anywho, Fatherless Natalie goes to college, where she’s surrounded by some hoes in this house, including Reena. Reena is hated by Natalie because she…*checks conservative anti-woke talking points notes* sleeps with men and wants a career.
In college, Natalie also meets Caleb. Caleb is a rich, jobless, porn-addicted, conservative-manosphere-loving moron. However, his father is a rich, conservative politician and his mother is a drug addict.
This is when I started questioning my decision to read this book, because things already weren’t making sense to me.
Natalie:
- is not really a Christian
- what type of Christian is she even supposed to be? FLDS? IBLB? Catholic? Baptist? Evangelical? The author never really says
- she was baptized by a priest… but Natalie doesn’t seem to be Catholic and never mentions Mass
- doesn’t believe men are superior to women
- Natalie believes she’s superior to everyone else
- doesn’t think she belongs in the kitchen.
- doesn’t like children
- doesn’t seem like a golddigger
- doesn’t seem to enjoy homesteading, cooking, being around other people, etc.
All of this is obvious because Natalie basically tells the reader these things.
Consequently, why Natalie forces herself into this specific mold of womanhood she doesn’t believe in is never truly explored, because Natalie already thinks that idea of womanhood is stupid, and so does the author.
Also, Christian is vague. There are progressive Christians, conservative Christians, far-right lunatics, Christians who only wear skirts and don’t cut their hair. Christians who wear string bikinis and walk around shirtless with tattoos.
The author never really specifies what type of Christian Natalie is likely because religion is simply a medium here for the author to snark on trad wives. Burke doesn’t seem interested in truly exploring any of the themes presented in her work with any depth.
This is the main issue I have with Natalie/Yesteryear. Characters in books like Yesteryear do not really believe their own beliefs.
Instead, these characters exist for authors to critique those beliefs without truly exploring why people hold those beliefs in the first place.
In real life, conservative women exist and do sincerely believe in their lifestyles. Some of them are genuinely happy; many of them are not.
But these women do believe marriage/motherhood is peak Biblical Womanhood, and they’re all over social media, exploiting their children for brand deals while criticizing the very feminism that allows them to have a social media platform.
See: SaraTherese, Ballerinafarm, The Duggar family, The Bates family, MisforMama, Nowthatwereafamily, Candace Owens, Allie B. Whatever, etc. The list goes on.
However, Yesteryear misses its chance to explore why an intelligent woman like Natalie would settle for an unhappy life of marriage and children she doesn’t want with a husband she despises. It really never asks why women support ideologies that harm them.
It never really comments on the irony of being anti-feminist while using the very things feminism gave them, i.e., Natalie opens her own bank account after seeing how bad Caleb is with money, which is only possible because of feminism.
In Yesteryear, the plot dictates Natalie be a trad wife. So, Natalie is a trad wife. Rather than explore why Natalie feels the need to be a trad wife, or even simply say Natalie was raised in “x” fundamental dogmatic religion, the story just kinda moves along.
I guess this is the difference between plot-driven stories and character-driven stories, and Yesteryear is the latter. However, for a book this long, there was a lot of stuff that could’ve been cut out to make room for a little exploration of Yesteryear’s interesting themes.
Consequently, everything that follows Natalie marrying Caleb reads like some weird revenge porn fanfiction instead of an exploration of patriarchy, traditional gender roles, religion being misused to subjugate women, etc.
To be fair, Natalie is an unreliable narrator and is also insane. Even before she starts pumping out kids for Jesus, she’s mentally unwell. But Natalie is never really explored with any complexity, just snark.
Is Natalie craving the stability of a traditional marriage that her single mother couldn’t provide? Is the reason why she wants a domineering husband because Natalie never had a father figure, and subconsciously wants to be provided for and protected? Does she latch onto Caleb’s wealth because she struggled financially growing up and doesn’t want to struggle again? Why does she have so much beef with her sister?
Sure, the answers to these questions are sort of found amongst the inane wangsting Natalie does, but they’re never fully explored.
Anyway, Natalie marries Caleb and moves into his parents’ house, where Caleb still doesn’t work and still watches porn.
Why do they move in with his parents?
Caleb’s father, Donald Trump Doug, is a powerful and wealthy US (CONSERVATIVE) politician. He gives Natalie and Caleb 5 million dollars to buy a ranch. But apparently finding a job for Caleb is beyond his abilities.
Natalie knows Caleb is lazy and jobless. Guess which of the following options she chooses to remedy his laziness.
- threatens to leave Caleb
- gets Caleb in therapy
- goes to couples counseling
- asks her mother or anyone for real help on what to do
- goes to therapy
- directly asks her husband to get a job
- subtly encourages her husband to get a job or continue his education
- travels the world
- kills Caleb in his sleep
- hires someone to kill Caleb in his sleep
- abandons her children and disappears into the woods
- has a child with him and borrows millions from Caleb’s father to buy land in the middle of nowhere so they can grow pesticide-riddled tomatoes while knocking herself up with his sperm because he can’t get hard enough to sleep with her and she promised Doug an army of pure Aryan children for the Lord
- all of the above
If you chose 12 (0r 11), you win!
Caleb gets a ranch and barn office, where he can watch manosphere videos in between the manly Christ-like act of watching porn. This is probably after he bosses around the hired help (Home Depot Mexicans who actually run the ranch) and lamenting the death of his cows?
I guess the bright side here is that Caleb isn’t pulling a Steven Anderson or Toby Willis of The Willis Family.
Anyway! After buying Yesteryear Ranch, Natalie begins a social media account. Some fat conservative presumably incel-adjacent podcaster mentions Natalie’s Instagram to his army of losers, and she goes viral and gains a bunch of followers for being the “ideal” woman. White, married young, pumping out kids, and cooking from scratch, and “Christian.”
If you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering: is Yesteryear a parody? Satire? Comedy? Greek tragedy?
Who’s to say? The story’s erratic tone is likely meant to match Natalie’s frenzied mental state, but it feels like bad writing akin to my blog posts.
The author never really comments on the ethics of mommy bloggers exploiting their children online, other than in the form of homewrecker Shannon saying Natalie’s oldest daughter, Clementine, dislikes being filmed.
However, I found Shannon to be equally as bad as Natalie.
Shannon
- is hired by Natalie to be a videographer (?)
- does a good job
- dislikes Natalie even though, besides the sleeping situation, Natalie doesn’t seem like a terrible boss (?)
- seduces and sleeps with Caleb despite having no intention of actually being with him
- did she sleep with Caleb just to spite Natalie (?)
- gives a child (Clementine) a phone… so that Clementine can film dying animals, Natalie’s temper tantrums, and pesticide-laced organic tomatoes
Frankly, I found it unrealistic that Clementine would expose her mom and/or not tell Caleb or Natalie about Shannon, because kids expose everything. Natalie obviously hates her children, but most of her vitriol towards them seems internal.
Pre-1800s crash-out, Natalie doesn’t particularly come off as cruel or neglectful because Natalie shifts most of the actual responsibilities of child-rearing onto others. She also cares a lot about how others perceive her.
This brings me to the reason why I read Yesteryear: Natalie waking up in the 1800s. The set up to Natalie waking up in the past is the best part about the book.
That said, there’s no point in summarizing the past chapters because literally nothing happens in them.
It’s obvious Natalie isn’t in the past from the moment she wakes up in “the past”. Furthermore, nothing happens in the past that would make me believe Natalie is in the 1800s.
And that’s the twist. Natalie is simply insane and on drugs.
Remember that homewrecking hoe Shannon? Turns out she really did take the job at Yesteryear Ranch just to expose Natalie as fake and her produce as not being organic.
After Natalie learns Shannon is sleeping with Caleb and Caleb is leaving her to move to New York with Shannon, Natalie confronts Shannon and chokes her out.
And look, I support choking out cheating hoes. I ain’t saying it’s right or Christian, but this was one of the few times I was fully on Natalie’s side.
However, the most realistic thing about that entire scenario with Shannon was Doug saying it would’ve been better if Caleb had raped Shannon, because that would be easier than Natalie being a lesbian.
This incident causes Natalie to lose everything, which again makes no sense. IRL, Natalie’s core fanbase wouldn’t care because they’d call the situation fake news.
Even if she lost her sponsors, she could claim persecution from the radically woke left and start a GoFundMe. Nobody would actually believe Natalie is a lesbian. Shannon would probably get most of the hate, because Natalie has a larger online platform and a father-in-law who’s rich.
That’s not what happens, which tracks because nothing in this book is realistic. Instead, Natalie’s already fractured mental health BSODs and never reboots to Windows.
She convinces her husband to go off the grid and live like they’re really in the 1800s. Natalie’s first set of children flee as soon as they’re old enough, and Natalie replaces them with more children (???).
Somehow, Natalie and Caleb go unnoticed by anyone for like a decade. CPS is never called. Natalie never has any difficult births requiring hospitalization. Doug tries to visit once or twice and then just stops?
What about Eliza? Or Natalie’s sister? Natalie didn’t even disappear; she’s on the ranch with her still deadbeat now abusive husband.
This brings me to my final gripe, which is Caleb and the lack of any true commentary on how patriarchy is what keeps women like Natalie acting like Natalie.
For most of the book, Caleb is a harmless moron. Later in the book, he becomes an abusive moron, who presumably gets off scot-free while Natalie is jailed for child abuse.
And yes, this is realistic. In reality, women take the blame even when their partners are equally culpable.
That said, Caleb goes from a dumb but harmless dolt who wants to be a kindergarten teacher to a dude who watches his kids live in squalor and beats/rapes/drugs his wife?
Why? Was it the manosphere? What was the long-term goal here for him? Did he think nobody was ever going to come looking for them? Why didn’t he just divorce Natalie and move to New York?
This seems at odds with the Caleb who seemed to at least initially enjoy his children even if he was intentionally clueless about how to take care of them. And he never seemed malevolent, just really stupid and spoiled.
It also isn’t reflective of reality and again, seems like a missed chance to critique harsher patriarchs like Jim Bob Duggar of the Duggar Family, who now has two sons in trouble for diddling kids. Or critique those like the dude who wrote To Train Up a Child, which resulted in actual children being beaten to death. Even crazies like Steven Anderson.
But that’s because Yesteryear isn’t really a critique of anything.
It’s more like funsdiesnarkuncensored on steroids. It’s a weird sort of revenge fiction about someone like Hannah Neelman of Ballerinafarms, who is basically guilty of selling raw milk, having a film crew and nanny, and looking tired. Are those really offenses worthy of the sort of vitriol that gets thrown at her? Especially when none of us, including the author, actually know anything about Ballerinafarms?
There is no attempt at exploring why women like Natalie support ideologies that harm them. There is no critique of men like Doug who promote religion and family values as the cure to societies ills. while having terrible marriages and lazy, unproductive sons, and being racist in the name of religion.
There is no real critique of lazy traditional husbands, who expect their mentally unwell wives to submit and pump out kids while they refuse to work (see: Paul and Morgan Olliges of the Paul and Morgan Show or therodriguesfamilyservingJesus).
There isn’t even any decent critique of religion here. How Christianity is often used to oppress women, even though traditional gender roles, like the sort Natalie tries forces herself into, are found nowhere in the Bible.
Yesteryear‘s interesting premise is never brought to fruition. Instead, it settles on being a revenge fantasy that seems to lump women into two rather narrow categories: miserable conservative housewives or maybe happy liberal career women.
The only real lesson one can glean here is to not believe everything on social media. Most of it is highly curated, controlled, and fake like Natalie’s online persona.
However, if in the year 2026 people still believe what they see online is real life, they’re just as mentally ill as Natalie.
Yesteryear Rating: 3.5/10
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